A New Non-Invasive Therapy vs Muscle Stiffness

…and other items from this week’s health science news:

We think you’ll like the sound of this

Researchers (Dr. Tomohiro Umeda et al.) found that ultrasound can help vs muscle stiffness.

The deep-muscle challenge: the soleus is a major calf muscle located beneath the gastrocnemius, making it harder to target with approaches such as stretching, heat, and vibration that have mainly been studied in superficial muscles.

• What the intervention was: participants received 10 minutes of continuous ultrasound stimulation at 1 MHz and 2.0 W/cm² on one randomly selected leg, while the other leg remained untreated.
• How they measured its results: shear wave elastography was used before and immediately after treatment, with faster shear wave velocity indicating greater passive muscle stiffness.
• What they found: shear wave velocity decreased significantly in the soleus after ultrasound stimulation, indicating reduced passive stiffness, while the untreated leg showed no significant change.

In practical terms, what this means is that ultrasound stimulation may provide a non-invasive way to reduce stiffness in deep muscles such as the soleus, supporting conditioning and rehabilitation strategies for muscle injuries.

The next step will be to look into finding the optimal ultrasound parameters for different muscles and which individuals respond most effectively:

Read in full: Ultrasound may offer a noninvasive way to manage deep muscle stiffness

Related: Ultrasound vs Arthritis!

Where there’s smoke, there’s health risks

In recent studies by Dr. Min Zhang and Dr. Yaguang Wei, among 414,016 adults aged 65 and older with lung cancer, both wildfire and non-wildfire PM2.5 (pollution with particles of that size) were associated with higher mortality, but equivalent increases in wildfire-related PM2.5 were associated with substantially greater toxicity.

There was also a startlingly disproportionate mortality: wildfire-related PM2.5 accounted for about 4% of total PM2.5 exposure but was estimated to account for about 17% of mortality related to total PM2.5 exposure among the lung cancer population studied.

A similar effect was observed in cardiovascular and respiratory disease, whereby analysis of more than 57 million cardiovascular hospitalizations and nearly 33 million pulmonary disease hospitalizations across 20 US states found that long-term wildfire-related PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased hospitalization risks for conditions including heart failure, ischemic heart disease, hypertension, asthma, pneumonia, and COPD.

So, definitely a thing to take seriously, if/when wildfire smoke comes to your area!

Read in full: Wildfire smoke may be more harmful than other air pollution, two Mount Sinai studies find

Related: Wildfires ignite infection risks, by weakening the body’s immune defences and spreading bugs in smoke

Important to remember

A recent study has found that 67% of older Americans with probable dementia who had a dementia diagnosis documented in their Medicare records did not report that a doctor had ever told them they had dementia or a memory-related disease.

Notably, among the same patients, underreporting was much lower for other diagnosed conditions, including high blood pressure (23%) and arthritis (17%); across the four comparison conditions studied, the average was about 31%.

As to why this happens, the findings point to stigma, and/or disagreeing with the diagnosis, and inadequate communication from the health system as potential contributors.

However…

❝A diagnosis that sits in a chart but never registers with the patient delivers almost none of the benefits that early detection is supposed to bring.

Reducing the stigma around dementia is a shared responsibility: the more openly we talk about it, the easier it becomes to accept a diagnosis and get the help that is available.❞

Read in full: Most older adults with dementia don’t report their diagnosis

Related: Alzheimer’s: The Bad News And The Good ← this is our “Expert Insights” feature on Dr. Gayatri Devi, She’s a neurologist, board-certified in neurology, pain medicine, psychiatry, brain injury medicine, and behavioral neurology. She’s also a Clinical Professor of Neurology, and Director of Long Island Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, and we could continue all day with her qualifications, awards and achievements but then we’d run out of space. Suffice it to say, she knows her stuff. In the above-linked article, we talk about how her work explores Alzheimer’s epidemiology, diagnosis, pathology, and planning, with a strong side of social destigmatization and a healthy dose of calm about it.

If you like that, you should definitely also check out: The Spectrum of Hope: An Optimistic and New Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias – by Dr. Gayatri Devi

Take care!